50 years later, Woodstock remains as real as the rain that drenched us just after Joe Cocker finished 'With a Little Help from My Friends.'

Awkward silences are common when baby boomers get together at parties. Beyond the grandkids or aging parents, everything else worth talking about seems to have happened so long ago. But a guaranteed icebreaker, at least for me, is to dig deep into my hippie past and announce, “I was at Woodstock.”

A few folks roll their eyes, but Woodstock usually sparks a nostalgic if curious conversation. “I wanted to go but my parents wouldn’t let me” is a common reply.

I did go, and now, 50 years later, those three days of peace and music remain as real as the downpour that drenched us moments after Joe Cocker finished his version of “With a Little Help from My Friends.”

Not to minimize the woes of the millennials who endured the fraudulent Fyre Festival in the Bahamas in 2017, but at least they had makeshift shelters, cellphones and credit cards before the thing was canceled.

We were ill-prepared for Woodstock

The conditions for the 400,000 of us at Max Yasgur’s farm were far worse: At least three torrential downpours produced a clingy, blob-like mud that came alive as you trudged through the muck, pulling off sandals, sucking down sneakers and swallowing up picnic baskets whole.

Despite a few makeshift food stands (one was famously burned down), finding anything to eat was a daily “do you have a spare muffin?” ritual. Portable toilets were clogged in the worst ways imaginable.

Very few of us brought tents (sleeping bags and backpacks weren’t yet standard issue in suburban New York), and the few previous music festivals of note — Monterey Pop in California, the Atlanta International Pop Festival — had either normal seating or controlled areas for blankets and folding chairs.

Our festival was a national spectacle

Totally unprepared for Woodstock’s ticketless anarchy, my girlfriend and I slept under trees, using clothes stretched on sticks as makeshift tents. Thousands slept together in the woods along the “Groovy Way” path, whether in relationships or not.

Of course there was no internet, no way to communicate with the outside world beyond enduring the long lines at a few pay phones. When we did call our freaked out parents — I was a 21-year-old college student — we didn’t realize that The New York Times, the New York Daily News and newsman Gabe Pressman on WNBC were treating the festival as a natural disaster. My parents calmed when I assured them that despite what they were hearing, Woodstock was “groovy.”

My brother and I had driven the family’s 1968 Chevy up the New York State Thruway, parking it on a lawn already packed with cars. My girlfriend, Eileen, now my wife, had taken a bus and somehow met us near the medical tent. No one ever collected our tickets.

David and Eileen Colton marry in Gibson, Pennsylvania, on July 11, 1971, two years after they were at Woodstock together.(Photo: Family photo)

Marijuana and LSD abounded, but it didn’t take drugs to realize we were in a new American landscape. If the moon landing a few weeks earlier had been, as Time magazine called it, a “triumph of the squares,” this “gathering of the tribes” at Woodstock would be the high point of the 1960s counterculture.

The crowd, the people, us, it turned out, was to be the story — sharing, dancing, chanting, skinny-dipping, surviving. It was wonderful in its misery.

We were given oatmeal one morning by famed hippie Wavy Gravy’s Hog Farm collective, a psychedelic bus playing Grateful Dead bootlegs as women, of course braless, swayed to the music.

The tiny stage, so far away at the bottom of a natural amphitheater, had no giant video screens, no way to see the performers. Only the superb sound system conveyed the power of acts such as Janis Joplin, The Band, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Who, Jefferson Airplane and, best of all, Sly and the Family Stone.

Festival was shrouded in rumor

I remember one woman, someone’s date (an archaic notion in the hippie paradise), looking completely out of place in a bright suburban pantsuit and halter top, hair coiffed and her back angrily turned from the stage. She wanted to go home, but of course she couldn’t. Once you got there, Woodstock was for keeps.

The festival wasn’t heavily hyped — another sign of how times have changed. A modest ad in The Village Voice, some ticket sale ads on the radio. You had to be in on the 1960s rock scene to even know it was happening.

Rumors abounded: The Beatles would be there. The Rolling Stones were flying in. Bob Dylan, who lived in the real town of Woodstock 60 miles away, would make a surprise appearance. None did.

David and Eileen Colton, now of Arlington, Virginia, still have the free Woodstock poster given out on the last day of the festival.(Photo: Eileen Colton)

Waiting on the Woodstock babies

As many as three babies were said to have been born at Woodstock. Singer John Sebastian, who says he was tripping during his performance, told the crowd, “That kid is going to be far out.”

Years later, when I became a reporter, I and other journalists tried to track down the Woodstock babies, but local hospitals had no records of a birth; neither did medical staff working the festival.

To this day, no one has ever come forward as a “Woodstock baby.” If any do exist, happy 50th birthday! I bet you’re far out.

Find more memories in a USA TODAY Woodstock 50th anniversary special edition on sale at selected newsstands now.

David Colton is a former executive editor of USA TODAY. Follow him on Twitter: @DColtonNow